Quinn Slobodian on Understanding Muskism and the Politics of Tech Power

We found it useful to ask questions of Musk this way too. When you look closely, you discover that Musk does not only make cars, rockets, satellites, or trollish memes. He is proposing a new model with many modules that we outline in the book: from state symbiosis to sovereignty as a service, from an understanding of politics as governed by cybernetic collectives to a belief that consent can be automated through technology in ways that make received models of democracy and representation obsolete.

Muskism markets itself as futuristic and liberating, yet you argue it reinforces long-standing hierarchies and exclusions. Who benefits from this system, and who is left out?

One of the interesting challenges of writing the intellectual history of a capitalist is that you cannot use the usual tools of analysis and influence that historians usually rely on. Musk is not the person he is—and Muskism is not the system it is—because of a set of books, anime, or video games that helped produce it.

Rather, Musk and Muskism have an ideology that emerged from the creation of a profit model and the organization of production in a way designed to benefit that profit model. Seeing the world through the factory floor and the database, Musk has tended to view anything that stands in his way as a sign of bugs in the code.

At DOGE he expanded this notion to the discovery of so-called vampires and bots supposedly draining the federal state and filling it with sites of waste, fraud, and abuse. Expelling those bugs—of which illegal immigrants became the embodied form—became the primary goal of the undertaking.

Lacking a thick understanding of civic belonging or people’s sense of solidarity and collective understanding, he seems to think he can solve the problem of legitimacy through whipping up narratives of exclusion and hatred. His adoption of a whole set of memes and messages from the identitarian European far right—from the Great Replacement to calls for immigration restriction—are misguided attempts to hack the political process by identifying enemies and channeling resentment toward them. His increasing concern about the demographic decline of white European populations is only the most visible sign of an ever more clearly racially hierarchical worldview that sits at the heart of his ideology.

You note that Muskism “speaks of humanity but warns against empathy.” What does this tension tell us about contemporary attitudes toward solidarity, care, and collective responsibility?

Musk has called empathy an exploit in the human software, which can be seen as a criticism of cross-border migration, refugee policy, and even the moderate version of the welfare state that exists in the United States.

Yet it is also helpful again to return to the factory. Fordism had many shortcomings—including dependence on carbon-driven growth—but it was also, in some ways, a philosophy of social peace. It sought a space of compromise between the demands of workers—whom Ford needed at the assembly line—worked out through collective bargaining agreements and recognition of the right to unionize.

Musk, by contrast, preaches a philosophy of social war. He refuses even this basic modern level of compromise with his own workers and has a preference for eliminating them wherever necessary. It is telling that the Gigafactory of Tesla outside Berlin is the only auto factory in Germany without a collective bargaining agreement, and that Swedish Tesla workers have been engaged in the longest labor struggle in the nation’s history.

This and many other parts of Muskism are symptomatic products of a decades-long process whereby forms of redistribution through the tax system were dismantled, regulations governing the conduct and autonomy of the wealthiest members of the corporate class were reformatted, and the ability of a few individuals to massively influence the political process has become a constitutionally protected right. As with many things, Musk is not the cause of these processes, but he is one of the most visible—and often monstrous—symptoms.

What do you hope readers take away from Muskism?

In the book we identify the core of Muskism as the promise of sovereignty through technology that in fact cashes out as excessive dependency on private actors. The pedagogical utility of Musk is that his very exaggerated qualities make it necessary to come to terms with what it means to be dependent on the often capricious decision-making of a single erratic person now guided by a far-right worldview.

One alternative would be to simply use the kind of methods that were circulating in the Biden administration—against which Silicon Valley leaders revolted so violently—namely antitrust oversight and subjection to democratic accountability.

The second option would be to replace the functionality of the services that Musk offers: use Blue Origin instead of SpaceX, drive a Rivian instead of a Tesla, and switch from X to Bluesky.

While probably necessary remedial steps, our hope with the book is that people take the third option and see this as an opportunity to reimagine our relationship to tech altogether. It is not inevitable that we make the exchanges we have over the last two decades—swapping privacy for convenience and face-to-face interaction for the sociability of the platform designed for outrage, shock, and the sowing of further dissent.

The incursion now of generative AI into the classroom is a stark example of this. There is no such thing as pedagogy as usual when the ability to answer every question at a reasonable—even exceptional—level at any length of prose sits in everybody’s pocket. We need to ask basic questions again about what community is for, what learning is for, and how forms of civil society can make use of technologies for their own ends instead of being used for the ends of tech firm’s profit margins.

To learn more about Professor Slobodian’s new book, click here.

To learn more about Prof. Quinn Slobodian’s work and achievements, visit his faculty profile.